Seventeen Favorite Moments

These tidbits are in the order they popped into my mind – after WBEZ radio host Jerome McDonnell challenged me to think about highlights from my work and mission. Perhaps there’s some subconscious meaning lurking in the order they popped up in.

I write them for anyone who wrestles with decisions about free time, careers, life goals, and such Lofty Considerations. They're also about ecology, fun, and happiness.

When Rolland Eisenbeis said “yes”

I yelled and jumped up and down as soon as I hung up the phone. Sometime in 1977, I had written the Forest Preserve District and offered to help. Their prairies were obviously dying. They didn’t seem to recognize how precious a heritage they owned.  

Their first response letter had turned down my offer. But I kept asking, with a smile on my face, and encouraging others to ask. Was I politically smart, trying to form a constituency? I approached people who might have influence – and community groups near the preserves. I gave slideshows, and tours, and encouraged folks to send supporting letters to the Forest Preserve District. One day, lawyer and tour-attendee Charlotte Adelmann called to say “congratulations.” I asked, “For what?” She said, “You didn’t know? Superintendent of Conservation Roland Eisenbeis at the Forest Preserves answered my letter. He said, yes. You can do it." Perhaps lawyer Adelmann knew how to write a good letter.

She gave me the phone number. I called Eisenbeis, scared, eager, trying fiercely to have a calm and level-headed exchange with him. Eisenbeis in the end said I could organize a group to cut brush and plant nearby-gathered rare prairie seeds. We would call it the North Branch Prairie Project. I probably uttered, “yes, sir” a hundred times. He was willing to give us a try, on an experimental basis. I foresaw hard work, relished it, and glowed for weeks. I saw adventure, experiment, and a worthy future.

My first burn.

At Searles Prairie in Rockford. Learning from experts. A well-organized team can totally control where a fire goes and where it doesn't. Learning to lead is exhilarating, challenging, and has elements in common with learning to drive a car (or change a baby, or conduct a symphony). It’s not easy at first. You have to pay attention to many different components at the same time as you make rapid decisions. Most people could become competent at it, with practice. Perhaps few people would be outstanding when conditions are most complicated. You need to be a good judge of skills and coordinator of people. You need to understand the biology of the ecosystem and the physics of fire. 

First you shield everything that needs protection, using backfires. I learned that day that ducks fly into ponds in the middle of the burn area – and hawks cruise the fire line – because unlike the cartoon animals in Bambi, many see fire as a cafeteria. Toasted grasshoppers rule. I learned that burns with thirty foot flames are dramatic, but comprehensible. We controlled them.

Prof. Robert Betz (white shirt) supervises a controlled burn - and educates the media. 

First Langham Island workday

This moment was just a few years ago. An Illinois Native Plant Society tour had taken us to Langham Island, one of the most important ecological preserves in the state. When we stepped out of our canoes, confusion transpired. I was appalled. The globally rare plants and famous ecosystem were nowhere to be found. Managers had not burned for many years. How was it that no one knew? But now, in my old age, and with fine colleagues, it was clear how to start yet another little volunteer community, how to get approvals, how to make the plan.  

We came, we cut, we burned, we planned a better future for Langham Island. Instead of Visions of Sugarplums, we had visions of restored ecosystem dancing in the sun, dancing in our heads. Everyone glowed that day.

Poplar Creek kick-off day

Another little group like the North Branch Prairie Project. But the first place where the Forest Preserve District agreed to a Big New Concept of collaboration. 200 acres of Poplar Creek Forest Preserve. I now was Science and Stewardship Director for The Nature Conservancy and agreed to recruit, train, and manage a major restoration including a high-quality prairie nature preserve, 200 acres of former cornfields, and 60 acres of oak woodland. We advertised as widely as we could. Would anyone come? (All previous groups had assembled through the long, painstaking recruitment of a person or two a month.)

Twenty serious people would have made me very happy. Eighty showed up. I quickly found people to do versions of the tour I had expected to lead. After an intro speech, I asked the crowd a question that seemed bold at first: “There are too many people here to do what we planned. Are there individuals here who’d be willing to help plan and lead this larger group?” A dozen people raised their hands.

“Oh, wonderful,” I said. “Someone else will now take over this MC work that I’m doing, and would those twelve people who raised your hands meet me to plan next steps – by the tree off to the east there.”

I described the challenge and the potential to the heroic dozen. One said, “I’ll do the newsletter.” Another said, “I can lead seed gathering.” Another said, “I’ve done fire control with the U.S. Forest Service; I can lead burns.” And yes, there would be bumps ahead, and, yes, a ton of training and coordination. But it was clear that first day, 30 years ago, the Poplar Creek Prairie Stewards (as they named themselves) would thrive. Now hundreds of acres of tallgrass prairie and oak woodland plants, birds, frogs, and all thrive with them. Glorious. 

A planning group early in the history of a new conservation community. Looks delicious. Yes? 

Victory around the big table in the Founders’ Room at the Field Museum

By 1995 there were thousands of stewards working at hundreds of sites. This new phenomenon/community was covered extensively by the national and local media: newspapers, TV, magazines, and books. But I could see big potential trouble on the horizon. We were over-extended. Throughout the state and region, and especially in the Chicago suburbs, we were changing the landscape and culture in a major way. And we were too innocent.

Well-meaning and generous (sometimes introverted) stewards were coming into conflict with neighbors accustomed to dumping garbage in the preserves, renegade mountain-bikers who for years had been wrecking certain rare patches of ecosystem, equestrians similarly, businesses mowing or squatting on the edges of preserve land, and many such special interests. Some of these resentful people, though legally in the wrong, were starting to say, “Who the hell are these hippies or whoever they are who think they can cut trees down, and burn the place up, and who support the killing of deer, and think they own the place?” They were assembling an organized opposition. We needed more friends, more education, more strategy, and more clout.

Some of us cooked up the idea of a major collaboration to be called “Chicago Wilderness.” Many of the leadership institutions of the region (previously little involved in local conservation) would join together for support. After agonizing years of prep, the leaders of 32 influential organizations (including Forest Preserve Districts, federal and local government agencies, museums, zoos, and conservation organizations) assembled around the Field Museum’s most elegant table in its most elegant and private room (normally reserved for board meetings).

Some influential not-for-profits resisted. They saw a Nature Conservancy ploy to usurp a bigger share of the funding pie. But good science and media coverage had convinced most that this was important. The president of the Field Museum agreed to chair. All those little volunteer groups were on their way to being an integral part of the region’s culture.

First potluck of the North Branch Prairie Project 

Every weekend that first fall, I recruited and led whoever came – to cut brush and gather seeds. During the first few weeks, sometimes just a person or two showed. Sometimes a dozen. But we kept at it, and gradually bonds grew.

Donna Jepson proposed, organized, and hosted a midwinter potluck. At that ordeal, in Donna’s apartment, I learned something about myself. I arrived borderline catatonic. This group was so important to me. I feared disaster. I felt panic over my social incompetence. I tried to look people in the eyes, smile, and make small talk. It seemed to be working. People felt good toward each other and me. This group was becoming my family.

Was I required to make a speech, as the person who started this? If so, could I avoid mistakes in tone or content? Was I capable, in my cowering state? But then it became clear that no one required any speech from me. We were friends. Other people were in charge of all that needed leadership. We chilled together and looked forward to work starting again in spring. In 2018, we’ll have our 40^th mid-winter potluck.

Being hired at Illinois Nature Preserves Commission

Up until 1978, at 35 years old, I had never had a real job. Oh, I had done manual work in a steel mill, delivered newspapers, had volunteer positions for peace and civil rights, and did my best in a shaky environmental not-for-profit where part of my job was to raise my own salary ($95/week). But I’d never had a serious job which my long-suffering parents might think worthy of their support for my college education. 

The Nature Preserves Commission admired my volunteer work and hired me for a real job. I was at last an adult normal person, sort of, with wonderful colleagues and an inspiring respectable mission.

Publishing Chicago Wilderness magazine

Just as it was hard to convince the assembled CEOs to launch Chicago Wilderness the coalition, it was harder to later convince them to support a magazine. Some delegates insisted that their agencies had tried it, and it didn’t work. Others seemed almost jealous of those of us working full time at this, having too many successes. Or perhaps they worried about “emperor has no clothes” articles, about their institution’s “failings” or “needs.” Might we rock the boat? So many approvals would be needed that dullness would be guaranteed.

We reached out and assembled a separate magazine board that would be too difficult to say “no” to. The four key members were the Director of the Brookfield Zoo, the Director of the Chicago Botanic Garden, the publications and outreach Vice President of the Field Museum, and the assistant director of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. North Branch volunteer (and professional magazine writer) Debra Shore became editor. The region’s best photographers supplied inspiring artwork.

Before long the magazine had sixteen thousand subscribers and was sold at supermarket counters and bookstores throughout the region. It lasted six powerful years until it finally succumbed to the same kind of politics that almost thwarted it in the first place. But, in the meantime, it tickled and empowered so many.

Leading my first fire

The North Branch Prairie Project was thriving, but the prairies themselves desperately needed burns. Forest Preserve District staff had done a few, rarely. They felt guilty about that, and they took a bold step. Since I was now an employee of the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission, and since the INPC had from time to time led burns for the Cook Forest Preserves, perhaps I could just lead them myself.

Thus a 100% volunteer (plus me) fire crew was born. I trained them on the spot. They were quick learners and a fine team. One FPD staffer showed up at the beginning, the regional Superintendent. He was a gruff but great guy. Yet I feared he’d freak at the thirty-foot flames in the later stages of effective fires. So I stalled and stalled. I kept finding patches to make “test burns” and made sure those patches consisted of fuels that would barely burn. I kept telling him that we needed to wait longer for the humidity to drop a bit more. He was a busy guy with not a lot of patience for standing around. Finally he said, “Okay, I gotta go.”

We completed secure firebreaks and sent the wall of healing flame over the center of the site. We all felt like we’d painted a masterpiece of ecology.

Two speeches in London

Our work was so far out ahead that I got invited to speak widely at conferences. The most impressive was the one at the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, London. Kew for generations had been a world center of botany and ecology. New leaders from every continent were the audience. I was one of the few without learned degrees and was awed to be in this crowd. We quickly discovered that our conceptions of conservation were so incomprehensibly different that we’d have made an Ecological Tower of Babel, except for us being all so earnest and eager to learn from each other.

Many of us gave sessions. But on the last day, the conference organizer sidled up to me and alerted me that he was going to call on me to give one of the summary closing talks. I was eager to get back and tell the Chicago team. The world appreciates us.

White fringed orchids

My first orchid experiments started alone with some toothpicks and a Styrofoam cup that I’d found lying around the edge of a nearby horse trail. Five years later, when an entomologist congratulated me for the orchids he’d found at my planting site, I raced up to see them. He’d said the showy devils would be visible nearly from the parking lot, I could find them nowhere.

In time we’d learn: they take five years to flower from seed; then the deer eat most of them; but we could invent solutions to their many problems. We’d restore them by the hundreds, and then they could take their place in nature without us.

On the way to that success, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service adopted our model as part of the global recovery plan for the species. Favorite moment? Yes every year there were a few, off in some blooming, waving, singing prairie – realizing that thousands of orchids on scores of sites were now intermeshed with scores of generous stewards, all optimistic about good futures.

Found Mead list at Crerar

In the dusty stacks of the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago are old books that I thought might save me from intellectual abuse.

We had claimed that our team was gradually restoring a lost landscape. The black soil savanna had been one of the richest ecosystems of North America, but being most dependent on regular burning, it was also one of the first to disappear. Academic sources said that no list of original savanna plant species was known. In the absence of such a list, some experts said, our experiments were meaningless.

But Chicago winters are cold, and perhaps some library held, somewhere, the needed list of plants. My first full day at the Crerar turned up nothing much. On my second day, I checked through an 1846 issue of The Prairie Farmer. Articles described how to make fences without trees, best recipes for compost heaps, how to drain fields of excess water. But then there came “Catalogue of Plants Growing Spontaneously in the State of Illinois.” The unique feature of Dr. Mead’s list is that he put letters after each species name, indicating whether it grew in forest (T for timber), prairie (P of course), or various other habitats one of which was B for barrens, a name that was sometimes used for savanna.

Sadly, challengingly, I recognized only a few of the names on his list. But scientific names change over a century and a half, so I started tracking down the modern names for those plants. Sure enough, again and again, these were the same plants our field research found flourishing when we worked to restore savanna. This list was a Rosetta Stone for, not just a language, but a revivable whole ecological community. Wow! And wow!

Our Savanna Conference of 1993

It was time for this savanna work to become respectable. Fortunately, North Branch Prairie Project volunteer Karen Holland was now an influential staffer with the U.S.E.P.A. – and a person who took bold initiative. She rounded up resources and announced an expert conference to clarify definitions, strategies, and priorities for savanna conservation. Pretty much everyone who knew savanna and oak woods trees, herbs, birds, and other biota flocked to this conference. It was a first of its kind, as EPA was new to this role, and the field was new, and we all set out to compile an Ecosystem Recovery Plan (perhaps the first of those?).

The New York Times science writer William K. Stevens would write it up, as he was in the audience, laboring to complete a book (Miracle Under the Oaks) that focused on our restoration work. From professors, conservation organization leaders, on-the-ground land managers – many needed perspectives put shoulders to a common wheel and did, indeed, forge that recovery plan. Good job.  

“A roomful of greatness”

This is a quote from Brian Seinfelt, a young fellow whose day job was delivering supplies to vending machines, but who had discovered ecological restoration and was devoting his free time to it.

He attended the “awards” event that we organized every second year at the banquet hall of the Brookfield Zoo. A dozen or twenty people would be featured for inspired work. We’d read a thumbnail of their story, as they came forward to shake hands with someone important, receive their plaque and applause, and realize there’d be a big story about them and the ecosystem they stewarded in their local (and sometimes regional) newspaper. 

I was sitting at the same table with Brian, as was Gerould Wilhelm, famous author of Plants of the Chicago Region. Elected leader (later to be US. Rep. Mike Quigley) gave the kick-off talk. Beloved mentor Professor Robert F. Betz was surrounded by admirers early on, but as the evening developed, wonderful people from every table glowed, as they’d been bathed with applause during their honors walks.

Suddenly Brian blurted out, “I’m in a roomful of greatness.” He pegged it. We all felt it. It was good.  

Merenovicz says yes to Bartel

No one wanted to admit how important this was. For two years, no trees were being thinned to improve the quality of long-suffering prairies or oak woods – because of Cook County President John Stroger’s “moratorium” – resulting from politics too complicated for this brief account.

Some of us had helped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to wring $8,000,000 out of Material Services Corporation to end a lawsuit on environmental evils. Those funds became available through the Openlands Project for restoration. None were going to Cook County because of the complicated moratorium.

Marianne Hahn, president of Thorn Creek Audubon, had documented the decline of breeding prairie birds at what the birders called Bartel Grassland. We begged Director of Resource Management Chris Merenovicz to consider possible solutions. He visited the site with representatives of the major conservation groups (I was Chicago region Audubon director at the time). Merenovicz was no push-over. Indeed he was about as tough and firm as a public official can get. But the arguments made sense to him. Finally he said, yes, he could approve this. But they had no staff and no money for it. If we could find the money to hire contractors, he’d approve it.

Openlands accepted the concept the next day. I’d wondered if Merenovicz had thought seriously about how this would fit with the moratorium on cutting trees. But he barely skipped a beat. He said, “We’ll do this as bird habitat improvement. Not restoration.” Yes. And the good response to that good work meant the moratorium on tree cutting for restoration was over. Millions of dollars of restoration later, Bartel is a major destination for birders. Bobolinks galore. Plenty of harriers and short-eared owls too.

Similar funding at Orland Grassland, Spring Creek, Deer Grove and other sites is restoring woodlands, savannas, prairies, and wetlands vastly beyond what volunteers alone could do. This stuff makes a difference.

Coyotes and deer at the Orland Grassland. With community support, biodiversity conservation sites are getting bigger.
photo by Jeanne Muellner Stacey

Nachusa Grasslands big vision approved (and I don’t get fired)

Our TNC regional director in Minneapolis told me that our Illinois Director would fire me if I went against him on this, and the region would back him up.

Colleague Paul Dye and I had launched the first eastern tallgrass prairie project that could be big enough to support most prairie animals, including bison, perhaps, some day. Our director was, how shall I say, not fond of the volunteer program, or that project, or me. Twice a proposal to fund the full project was put on the agenda for our board meeting, and twice it was pulled off at the last minute.

Then it was scheduled for a meeting when I’d be away on vacation. I incurred expense to change tickets and bookings so I could be at that meeting. Then someone pointed out to me that the financials for the meeting showed what looked like a cooking of the books, suggesting that the projects I was associated with were out of funds. My closest colleague was to be fired (clearly in place of me, as the director had tried that earlier, but the board resisted).

In explicit violation of what our regional director told me, I called our board president and asked if I could talk with him confidentially. He said, “It depends on what you have to say.” Instantly I realized how obviously right his response was, and that it was time to throw caution to the winds.

I walked to Donnelley Publishing, where Charlie Haffner III, our board chair, was the CEO. We had our discussion. During my walk home, horrifyingly unexpectedly to me, he called our regional director. Following that, the fellow who wanted to fire me apparently had a fight with the regional director. He boycotted our board meeting. He was put on probation. The board enthusiastically approved the full Nachusa project. I was made acting director. (Somebody had to do it.) (But it’s sure not what I enjoy or am good at.) Today bison graze among thrilling biodiversity at Nachusa.

Savanna blazing star recognized as a species

For years I’d puzzled over a beautiful plant, hidden in a few obscure places, that didn’t match the technical descriptions in the texts. I’d brought it up from time to time with Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm, the region’s reigning botanists. Both said, forget it. The blazing stars are difficult. Probably just a hybrid.

But the savanna was emergng as a lost ecosystem. Savanna-like fragments were exactly where it grew. Wilhelm finally said he’d work on it if I’d provide him with proper dried herbarium specimens from the known populations along with lists of other species that grew nearby. I did it. Wilhelm and Marlin Bowles struggled and determined that this was a species hitherto unknown in the state and missing from all its books. (Well, it turned out, not completely unknown. S.B. Mead had included it in his 1846 list. But, like that list, it had been forgotten until now.) Soon this species, now called the savanna blazing star, was on the Illinois Threatened List, in all new books, and getting the restoration help it needed. Sweet.

First board meeting of Society of Ecological Restoration

What we were doing in Illinois was new. But other people were doing related stuff in California. Bill Jordan at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum began publishing a journal (now “Ecological Restoration” but then the humble “Restoration and Management Notes”).

Bill and the California folks took the lead in proposing a conference to launch the equivalent of the American Medical Association, but for ecosystem health. We would need a board. I got suggestions wherever I could and found expert and willing folks from Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, California, and representative states in between. It was such a pleasure to listen to these people and assemble the slate that would become our first board. We set something in motion that now spans the planet.

The end? Or what comes next?

This post is nine pages long on my computer. I hope it was readable as “a story.” Would it have been better if I’d cut a lot out? Perhaps others could make use of some parts as they write other stories and histories.

Actually, some parts are hardly true without added details and, especially, the other people who did as much or more than I in all these mini-stories. Especially lost is the “community wellspring.” So, I suppose, I’ll try, sometime, to do an expanded version too. But you don’t have to read it.

For Jerome’s full quote, that started all this, see “Comments” at http://woodsandprairie.blogspot.com/2017/12/wait-wait-i-meant-to-say.html